Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2022/Candidates/GeneralNotability/Statement

GeneralNotability

Hello everyone, I'm GeneralNotability and I am running for a seat on the Arbitration Committee. I bring two specialties to the table: anti-abuse/anti-harassment (particularly in terms of the CheckUser tool) and keeping the mail answered.

I've been an SPI clerk since shortly after I was elected as an admin in May 2020, and I was appointed as a CU a little over a year ago. I've spent a lot of time dealing with abuse – LTAs, spammers, undisclosed paid editing operations. That's the role I've grown into during my time on Wikipedia: keeping the place safe and harassment-free so that other folks can spend their time doing what they enjoy. Joining ArbCom is a natural extension of that; I know the committee does a lot of behind-the-scenes anti-abuse work, and I think my experience will be helpful there. As for the CheckUser tool itself, I've learned a lot about it in the past year and have grown into a pretty confident CU. Since ArbCom is responsible for both handling anti-abuse cases that involve CheckUser and overseeing English Wikipedia CUs, I think my expertise will be quite useful.

In terms of keeping the mail answered: during CUOS2021, I said I would work the checkuser and paid queues. I did. When I was appointed, there were hundreds of tickets in both queues and the backlogs for both went back over a year. As I write this, there's maybe ten unanswered tickets between the two queues and the average response comes within a week, and I worked something like 80% of all tickets handled in the past year. I want to bring that to ArbCom, too: if an editor emails the committee in good faith, they deserve both timely acknowledgment of their message and (if appropriate) prompt action.

And as a final thought: every account that gets pulled into an ArbCom case has a real live human behind the keyboard, and I want to make sure everyone who goes through the process is treated as a real live human. Arbitration is a confusing, bureaucratic, and stressful process, and the least we can do is show compassion, understanding, and assume good faith. Thank you for your consideration.

Disclosures: I am identified to the WMF and have signed the meta:ANPDP. A long time ago, I edited as geekboy72, and I currently use SubjectiveNotability on untrusted devices and GeneralBotability for bot tasks; I've also created (and blocked) a couple of doppelganger accounts.